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Coming down from the mountains, I was eating tafelspitz with my fingers. I was scooping up spaetzle -- sticky with gravy, dyed purple by the pickled cabbage it’d snuggled up against on the plate -- and shoveling it into my mouth. Like a caveman (or just another unprepared culinary day-tripper), I was lifting a slab of dripping top round to my mouth and tearing off bites with my teeth: Westfaelischer sauerbraten, the glory dish of Westphalia, one of the most recognizable in all of the German canon.

Laura was driving. My mom -- in town for another lightning visit, having arrived at dawn as if air-dropped from some sort of blacked-out parental commando flight -- was in the back. The two of them were talking about something; I had no idea what. I was oblivious to the conversation, the fruited plains, the purple mountain majesty all around me. Oblivious to everything but my impromptu, rolling lunch from Westfalen Hof: one of Colorado’s oddest, most maddening and most unique restaurants.

It’s all about the mountains this week, with visits to Westfalen Hof (Edward and Patricia Gumieniaks’s 9,000-foot-high love letter to all things Teutonic), the Georgetown Valley Candy Company, Kneisel & Anderson and the Raven Hill Mining Company in Georgetown.

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We don’t do a lot of reporting on food recalls here, but this recent one really caught my eye.

“On April 5, Malt-O-Meal announced that it was voluntarily recalling its unsweetened Puffed Rice and unsweetened Puffed Wheat Cereals produced with ‘Best If Used By’ codes between April 8, 2008 (coded as ‘APR0808’) and March 18, 2009 (coded as ‘MAR1809’) because they may have the potential to be contaminated with Salmonella. The recalled product was distributed nationally, marketed under the Malt-O-Meal brand and as some private label brands including Acme, America’s Choice, Food Club, Giant, Hannaford, Jewel, Laura Lynn, Pathmark, Shaw’s, ShopRite, Tops and Weis Quality.”

The above comes straight from the Malt-O-Meal website (www.malt-o-meal.com). I have just one question: How in the hell do you manage to get your puffed rice cereal infected with salmonella?

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Calling all couch potatoes! Check out the Food Network this Sunday at 7 p.m. for the Iron Chef America battle between Bobby Flay and Martin Rios of the Inn of the Anasazi in Santa Fe. Why? Because Chef Rios brought along his brother Daniel Rios as one of his two sous chefs, and Danny happens to work right here in Colorado, as banquet chef at the Westin Westminster.

Now, because the law-dogs at the Food Network make all their chef-contestants sign bazillion- dollar non-disclosure and liability agreements and would, if provoked, sue the crap out of Rios, I can’t reveal to you any details about the secret ingredient, the dishes cooked or the ultimate outcome of the episode. Still, it’s not like you’ve got very long before you can see it for yourselves, right? And after some of the less-than-friendly things I’ve said about Flay in the paper, I think everyone can guess who I’ll be rooting for. -- Jason Sheehan

No sooner had Jason Sheehan's review of Encore and its crooked tables hit the streets than those tables disappeared. The timing was pure coincidence, Sheehan reports in the current Bite Me.

But the new hats on the chefs -- replacing their Strawberry Shortcake: The Musical toques -- was no coincidence, as you can see from this photo. Hats off! -- Patricia Calhoun

GB Fish & Chips used to be a computer store before owner Alex Stokeld got his hands on it last year. But the place really looks more like the kind of place where computers might’ve been operated in secret, like maybe during the run-up to a nuclear war. It is a cement and cinderblock bunker of a fish restaurant—brightened up a little with some paint, a polished bar, a couple TV’s always tuned to international soccer matches and windows hammered out of the rock, but still just a cement box with a kitchen, a counter and a few tables inside it.

But GB Fish & Chips also happens to be a cement box with an awesome fish restaurant inside -- a place that should forever answer the transplant’s lament of “where can I go for a decent fish fry in this town?”

This week's review is followed by a pretty funny story from the guys over at Encore (and guess who's the butt of the joke?) as well as good news from Fruition and Toast.

In this economy, it's important to appreciate the good news when we hear it. -- Jason Sheehan

We are gathered here today to mark the passing of one of the oldest Chipotle restaurants in Denver, the location at 13th and Pennsylvania streets.

One of the original, 15-20 pre-McDonald's Chipotles, the store opened in 1998, back before the big-burrito chain -- founded in Denver five years earlier -- became a 700-store conglomerate. (McDonald's invested in Chipotle in 1998 and pulled out in 2006.) It recently closed.

The Capitol Hill spot was “relocated” to the Lowenstein Theater complex on Colfax and Elizabeth Street where access and parking are better, says Chipotle spokesman Chris Arnold. “The lag time was because we got the Lowenstein space a year ago,” he says. But the company had to wait until its ten-year lease on Pennsylvania expired before it could shut down there. With another store at 6th Avenue and Broadway, the company feels like it has the neighborhood covered, he adds.

That’s a wrap. – Jonathan Shikes

They say that everyone -- even the guy with the best gig in the world -- dreams occasionally of doing something else with his labors. I know chefs who dream of being musicians, musicians who’d love to be chefs, real estate brokers who spend their nights writing strange novels, and businessmen who’d give it all up to be doctors. Me? I wanna be a scientist. Doesn’t really matter what kind, though because of my intellectual proclivities and my love of slide-rules and giant graphing calculators, I think Rocket Scientist would be the most fun.

But failing that, film critic would be my second choice. Any job that would afford me the opportunity to eat Junior Mints and make vicious fun of Jason Schwartzman on a regular basis sounds pretty good, because I do love me some Junior Mints and Jason Schwartzman skeevs me out more than just about any human being on the face of the planet. And to get paid for eating Junior Mints and mocking Jason Schwartzman? Well, that would just be gravy.

Unfortunately, there were no Jason Schwartzman films playing at Neighborhood Flix during the time that I was setting it up for a review. The last major role he played on the big screen was in The Darjeeling Limited (which I actually liked quite a lot, in spite of Mr. Schwartzman’s starring role), and the next thing he’s got scheduled is The Marc Pease Experience, which isn’t due out until the end of the year (and also stars Ben Stiller, who generally makes me yawn and who I haven’t really loved in anything since he delivered the single most heartbreaking line in The Royal Tenenbaums). What there was, though, was There Will Be Blood.

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I’d been looking forward to seeing There Will Be Blood. It had been nominated for about a hundred Academy Awards, and my more serious film-nerd friends talked about it like it was a singular work of staggering genius that would shape the way Hollywood made movies for decades -- the Citizen Kane of their generation, and on and on like that. But I can sum up the entire movie in two lines: Daniel Day-Lewis begins as a miserable bastard with a fondness for silver and unusual facial hair. Daniel Day-Lewis ends as a miserable, drunken bastard with a fondness for oil and unusual facial hair. There is precisely one reason for seeing this movie, and that is to see Daniel Day-Lewis play a miserable, drunken bastard with unusual facial hair. There’s an even bigger reason not to bother: You’re going to spend two and a half hours watching Daniel Day-Lewis play a miserable, drunken bastard and, after about the first half-hour, the only thing that’s going to change about him is the unusual facial hair.

Are you getting the impression here that I did not like There Will Be Blood? Because if you are, you would be exactly right. I did not like the movie at all, and the time I spent watching it was only saved by the fact that I was watching it at Neighborhood Flix.

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Last week, I received this e-mail (reprinted verbatim) from a Mr. Jason Mason:

Sheehan (Mr Anthony Bourdain wannabe)

Bottom line stop kissing every chef's ass in town and grow up. Be an actual critic! Be like anthony bourdain instead of acting like a disgraceful half-a-sissy version of him.

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Here's my favorite story about the Mexico City Lounge -- a great neighborhood joint that was in the ballpark neighborhood long before Coors Field ever entered the picture. Back in the days when Denver having a Major League Team was just a pipe dream, Pete Coors was having lunch with some pals at the Mexico City, and the bar was having problems with its Coors tap.

So Pete went down in the basement (which couldn't have been pretty, because this storefront at 2115 Larimer Street dates back to Victorian days), fixed the tap, and then came back upstairs and finished his beer and tacos.

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Of the many contributions of the Irish to world culture—from colcannon and those silly snap-brim tweed hats of which my father is so fond to the music of the Pogues and the films of Jim Sheridan—I don’t think anyone would argue with my saying that whiskey is the best.

There’s an old Hibernian saying that goes something like, “If it wasn’t for whiskey, the Irish would rule the world.” But then again, who wants to rule the world? That sounds like a tough job. Better, then, to sit around all the day long, sipping a bit of Irish dew and talking of things inconsequential. Without whiskey, Brendan Behan might’ve lived a good while longer, but without whiskey he might never have come up with words as brilliant as the ones he strings together in Borstal Boy. Without whiskey (and a taste for the ponies), Shane McGowan would’ve never written “Fairy Tale of New York”—the single greatest Christmas song ever made. Without whiskey, I might’ve never asked my darling wife Laura to marry my punk ass, might not have gone through with the act on the day in question, and likely wouldn’t still be married today. As the Irish insist, “What whiskey will not cure, there is no cure for.” And love is one of those things.

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My friend and the waitress were still talking about recycling, about the re-use and re-application of found objects, cast-off materials. And though I was concentrating on the food, some of their conversation must’ve penetrated, because I found myself thinking about recycling, too. About the salvage and reclamation of forgotten things.

Cedar-plank salmon started disappearing from menus shortly after that. Sure, there were some places that still served it – just like there were tribes of aboriginal people found decades after World War II who’d stamped flat runways and built rickety bamboo control towers in anticipation of the return of American and Japanese supply planes. But by the turn of the millennium, as chefs chased after new fads, cedar-plank salmon had passed into the realm of cargo-cult cuisine.

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While most of the Best of Denver 2008 fallout has been outside the office, there's been plenty of talk here at Bite Me World HQ regarding my Best Green Chile award for Jack-n-Grill. Backbeat editor Dave Herrera takes it very personally when I say things about Colorado-style verde being just an insignificant knockoff of the New Mexican original, and often threatens to punch me for my out-of-towner’s perspective and obvious bias toward the Land of Enchantment.

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For the first time in 25 years, Westword's readers showed the collective good taste to choose something other than McDonald's french fries as the Best French Fries.Their choice? Bistro Vendome, which makes its delicious fries even more addictive with a salty/sweet sprinkle of spices.

The editorial choice for Best French Fries wasn't nearly as smooth a process. Since we're not big fans of sweet potatoes, we'd initially passed over the fries at Bistro Vendome for those at Fruition, a great restaurant made even greater by the spuds, fried in deliciously rich duck fat, that once attended the kitchen’s culotte steak. But one of Fruition's frequent menu shifts ditched the fries (the steak is still on the board), and in a category this contentious, we needed to find a fry that readers could try for themselves.

After some last-minute eating, Jason Sheehan found his Best French Fries: at Encore, the restaurant that opened last December in the Lowenstein project. Fine on their own, these fries are made even better by the squiggle of mustard the kitchen squirts on the spuds before sending them out.

Read about those fries here. And then run, don't walk, to brunch at either Encore and Bistro Vendome, and fry some spuds on for size. -- Calhoun

Every year, our work on the Best of Denver reminds us of not just what's new and wonderful in this city, but what we've lost -- although you don't see the latter in the final issue. We just take note of the dearly departed as we research, then discard, potential awards, because we discover that a certain dish is no longer served -- or that the place that served it has disappeared altogether.

That's what happened with Slayton & Corine’s, a bizarre little to-go joint tucked into the old McKinley mansion at 950 Logan Street. Last year, Jason Sheehan was tipped off to the place by a Capitol Hill neighbor, and he hurried over to try the joint, which he wrote about here.

But sadly, Slayton & Corine's has disappeared, and that wonderful fried tilapia is now just a memory. Ditto for the mean lemon and cream-cheese pie. -- Patricia Calhoun